CIVIL Rights and Wrongs

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ashmore ( Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan ) has been commenting on race for years, notably as executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette during the Little Rock desegregation crisis. He and the paper led the opposition to segregationist governor Orval Faubus and won Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage. At times his memoir/history bogs down, often neither close enough to the action nor offering new insight into race relations. Some passages remain interesting: how this white son of South Carolina grew skeptical of monolithic views of his region, especially W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941); how the NAACP's Walter White bested him in a 1948 segregation debate; how he helped presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson forge policy on race. Ashmore has encountered many important historical figures, from presidents to Malcolm X, and offers interesting context for the notorious Moynihan Report on the ``pathological condition'' of the black family. But his survey of racial issues in the past decade is armchair commentary--he unaptly describes Spike Lee's movies as ``sensational, antiwhite.'' Ashmore's heart may be in the right place, as he criticizes the conventional wisdom that racial prejudice no longer disfavors blacks, but he has tried to stretch a modest memoir into a major narrative. (May)

Library Journal

Ashmore, best known for his courageous newspaper coverage of the 1950s civil rights confrontations in Arkansas and for his historical analysis Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan (McGraw-Hill, 1982), has written an ambitious, involving, and often very personalized account of how the federal government has gradually come to accept its responsibilities in protecting the constitutional rights of black Americans. Ashmore's direct involvement in many of the events he discusses and his close associations with presidents, legislators, and civil rights leaders give his extended, detailed narrative an authority that most historical accounts lack. Although the book focuses on civil rights, its backdrop often reads like Theodore White's ``The Making of the President'' series; it is filled with fascinating political details of presidental campaigns during the last 50 years. Ashmore's clear, mannered prose criticizes friend and foe alike, but readers will not have any trouble deciding who are the good guys (moderate and liberal Democrats) and who are the bad (conservative and right-wing Republicans). Still, for all the civil rights progress that is documented here, Ashmore believes that ``a majority of whites have not yet put aside the traditional belief in their race's inherent superiority,'' which fosters black racism; he sees little hope that more progress can be made until the beliefs of white Americans are changed. Recommended for all Civil Rights collections.-Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego